Overview

Crack in America is the definitive book on crack cocaine. In reinterpreting the crack story, it offers new understandings of both drug addiction and drug prohibition. It shows how crack use arose in the face of growing unemployment, poverty, racism, and shrinking social services. It places crack in its historical context-as the latest in a long line of demonized drugs-and it examines the crack scare as a phenomenon in its own right. Most important, it uses crack and the crack scare as windows onto America's larger drug and drug policy problems. Written by a team of veteran drug researchers in medicine, law, and the social sciences, this book provides the most comprehensive, penetrating, and original analysis of the crack problem to date. It reviews the social pharmacology of crack and offers rich ethnographic case studies of crack binging, addiction, and sales. It explores crack's different impacts on whites, blacks, the middle class, and the poor, and explains why crack was always much less of a problem in other countries such as Canada, Australia, and The Netherlands. Crack in America helps readers understand why the United States has the most repressive, expensive, and yet least effective drug policy in the Western world. It discusses the ways politicians and the media generated the crack scare as the centerpiece of the War on Drugs. It catalogues the costs of the War on Drugs for civil liberties, situates crack use and sales in the political economy of the inner cities in the 1980s, and shows how the drug war led to the most massive wave of imprisonment in U.S. history. Finally, it explains why the failures of drug prohibition have led to the emergence of the harm reduction movement and other opposition forces that are changing the face of U.S. drug policy.

Full Product Details

Author:   Craig Reinarman ,  Harry G. Levine
Publisher:   University of California Press
Imprint:   University of California Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.499kg
ISBN:  

9780520202429

ISBN 10:   0520202422
Pages:   359
Publication Date:   01 September 1997
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock  
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

Table of Contents

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CONTRIBUTORS 1. Crack in Context: America's Latest Demon Drug Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine 2. The Crack Attack: Politics and Media in the Crack Scare Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine PART I * MYTHS AND REALITIES 3* In Search of Horatio Alger: Culture and Ideology in the Crack Economy Phillipe Bourgois 4* The Contingent Call of the Pipe: Bingeing and Addiction Among Heavy Cocaine Smokers Craig Reinarman, Dan Waldorf, Sheigla B. Murphy, Harry G. Levine 5* Two Women Who Used Cocaine Too Much: Class, Race, Gender, Crack, and Coke Sheigla B. Murphy and Marsha Rosenbaum 6. Crack and Homicide in New York City: A Case Study in the Epidemiology of Violence Paul] Goldstein, Henry H. Brownstein, Patrick] Ryan, Patricia A. Bellucci 7. The Social Pharmacology of Smokeable Cocaine: Not All It's Cracked Up To Be John P. Morgan and Lynn Zimmer PART II * CRACK IN COMPARABLE SOCIETIES 8. Crack Use in Canada: A Distant American Cousin Yuet W. Cheung and Patricia G. Erickson g. Crack in Australia: Why Is There No Problem? Stephen K. Mugford 10. Crack in the Netherlands: Effective Social Policy Is Effective Drug Policy Peter D. A. Cohen PART III * THE PRICE OF REPRESSION 11. When Constitutional Rights Seem Too Extravagant To Endure : The Crack Scare's Impact on Civil Rights and Liberties Ira Glasser and Loren Siegel 12. The Pregnancy Police Fight the War on Drugs Loren Siegel 13. Pattern, Purpose, and Race in the Drug War: The Crisis of Credibility in Criminal Justice Troy Duster 14. Drug Prohibition in the U.S.: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives Ethan A. Nadelmann PART IV * FROM PUNITIVE PROHIBITION TO HARM REDUCTION 15. Punitive Prohibition in America Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine 16. The Cultural Contradictions of Punitive Prohibition Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine 17. Real Opposition, Real Alternatives: Reducing the Harms of Drug Use and Drug Policy Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine Epilogue. We've Been Here Before: Excerpts from the 1967 Report of the Task Force on Narcotics and Drug Abuse of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of justice SUBJECT INDEX NAME INDEX

Reviews

Thoroughly researched and expertly written. . . the definitive book on crack. -- In These Times

Author Information

Craig Reinarman is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Harry G. Levine is Professor of Sociology at Queens College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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